Explores the interplay between artistic values and social, political, and moral concerns in writings by African American and Native American women.

Recent debates among scholars in Literature education have led to polarizing views about the aims of the subject. The debate reignites ancient quarrels about the aesthetic and political values of literary study and relatedly, the different pedagogical approaches to teaching. In the first part of this paper, I explore the aesthetic-political divide in Literature education paying particular attention to how this was reinforced by New Criticism and Poststructuralist Criticism as these were key movements that have had a significant influence on (...) the teaching of Literature in schools. More importantly, I argue that such a divide exemplified the different goals of the West, in which Literature education originated as a platform for the cultivation of taste, and Postcolonial countries, in which the subject was utilized as a political tool for colonization resulting in acts of mimicry and subversion among colonized subjects. In the second part of the paper, I apply third space theory to disrupt the aesthetic-political divide. I discuss the need to create third spaces in Literature classrooms that are critical, inclusive, negotiated and ethical allowing students to engage with aesthetic, political and ethical dimensions of literature. (shrink)

This article traces the multiple and rapid changes that have occurred during the past fifteen years, in theorizing "sex/gender arrangements". A secondary aspect is the reception, application and above all modification of these theories by some scholars of European medieval cultural production, in which varieties of difference are found that do not apply in modern societies. Deconstruction of the binary m/f (whether thought of as sexual or gender difference) erupted among feminist thinkers in the 1990s and eventually "queered" academic discourses (...) by destabilizing labels that had been naturalized, including a consistent gender identity for the individual in medieval or modern society. The author claims that queer and post-colonial theory, far from being antithetical to feminist theory, are out-growths of it, and exist in parallel; the proponents of each are concerned with the societal forces, including our own discourses, that maintain difference, and create communities of oppression Yet it is also necessary to raise the question, when will the next radical departure occur, and how will new theories be generated? (shrink)

Résumé Cet article retrace les changements multiples et rapides apparus au cours des quinze dernières années dans la théorisation des rapports entre sexe et genre. Il porte, en deuxième lieu, sur la réception, l’application et par-dessus tout la modification de ces théories par certains spécialistes de la production culturelle dans l’Europe médiévale, où la différence s’exprime sous des formes variées qui n’existent pas nécessairement dans les sociétés modernes. La déconstruction du système binaire masculin/féminin (qu’il soit considéré comme une différence sexuelle (...) ou de genre) fit son apparition parmi les penseuses féministes dans les années quatre-vingt dix et aboutit à la « queerisation » des discours universitaires en déstabilisant les étiquettes qui avaient été naturalisées, notamment l’identité genrée systématiquement attribuée à l’individu dans la société médiévale ou moderne. Nous montrerons que les théories queer et post-coloniale, loin d’être aux antipodes de la théorie féministe, en émanent et existent parallèlement à elle. Les partisans de chacune de ces théories s’intéressent aux forces sociétales, y compris notre propre discours, qui maintiennent la différence et créent des communautés d’oppression. Cependant, il est également nécessaire de soulever une question, à savoir quand se produira la prochaine rupture radicale et comment elle engendrera de nouvelles théories. (shrink)

(1997). So here comes a book that makes everything easy: Towards a theory of intellectual history in the field of intellectual production. Angelaki: Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 125-146.

This paper considers the trajectory of Althusser's Spinozism pre- and post-May ‘68. Where Althusser's application of Spinoza would often lead him into unknown or non-Marxist territory, one alternative way to think this relation is through the figure of Mao, whose concept of non-antagonistic contradiction I propose to read in terms of Spinoza's “determinate negation.” Although not going so far as to suggest that a certain combination of Mao and Spinoza would have enabled Althusser to “complete” Marx, this paper speculates on (...) this omission from his work and what positive insights we can draw from it retrospectively for developing Althusser's political philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Modernity as a Rhetorical Problem: Phronēsis, Forms, and Forums in Norms of Rhetorical CultureJames Arnt AuneThe true paradises are the paradises that we’ve lost.—Marcel Proust, The Past RegainedThomas B. Farrell’s Norms of Rhetorical Culture (1993, 6) remains both a masterly synthesis of previous constructive work in rhetorical theory and the essential starting point for anyone committed to reconciling the practical impulses of Aristotelian rhetoric, ethics, and politics with the (...) critical imperatives of modernity. In what follows, I try to make a very simple point about Farrell’s recuperation of Aristotelianism: he neglects matters of social causation and institutional design that were essential to Aristotle’s understanding of rhetoric. In turn, by displacing the social in favor of the cultural—a displacement characteristic of much recent work in the human sciences (Schudson 1997)—Farrell lacks a coherent account of the gap between the normative aspirations of classical rhetoric and the empirical characteristics of public life in modern liberal democracies.The problem appears most clearly in chapter 7 of Norms : “Criticism, Disturbance, and Rhetorical Community.” Farrell defines culture as “the common definition of places for the invention and perpetuation of meaning. A culture offers to those who live in it symbols and families of practices that [End Page 402] permit ongoing performances of meaning and value” (1993, 277). Summarizing his previous arguments, Farrell contends that Aristotle’s Rhetoric informs modern “cultural occasions” in three ways: “the impetus for rhetorical meaning, which we find in Aristotle’s seminal understanding of phronēsis, typified by deliberative prudence; a concept of rhetorical form, which we have found in the prototype for public inference and judgment—the enthymeme; and a modern rhetorical forum, a space of engagement wherein the modern constraints of rhetorical culture might assert themselves” (1993, 277). Although these three concepts are inherently useful, both for analyzing past rhetorical episodes and for projecting emancipatory rhetorical possibilities in the present, they are insufficiently grounded in a historical account of the differences between ancient and modern prudential deliberation, rhetorical forms, and rhetorical forums. An adequate history of these differences would require attention to modern social systems as a whole, which include the economy, the polity, and social institutions such as the family, schools, religious and ethnic organizations, and, most crucially for contemporary social systems, the entire apparatus of the culture industry, including the news and entertainment “media.”The cultural aspect of the modern social system, loosely following Talcott Parsons (1951), includes norms, which make for communal solidarity, and values, which undergird the whole system. Although a thoroughgoing account of the place of rhetoric in the entire contemporary social system of a modern liberal democracy such as the United States or Canada would have required a book three times as long as Norms, there are three ways in which modernity complicates the appropriation of Aristotle’s concepts. First, rhetorical meaning is very different in a social system in which individual autonomy takes precedence over communal solidarity as a fundamental value (Pippin 1999). Second, rhetorical forms function differently in a social system in which those forms can be commodified (Aune 1994, 2001). Third, rhetorical forums are also far more complex, especially in an extended republic like Canada or the United States, requiring greater attention to the way in which constitutions literally create persons who speak (such as the president or prime minister) and spaces for speaking (Congress, the state or provincial houses [White 1984]). The need to raise massive sums of money to obtain media access for common rhetorical deliberation, as is especially the case in the United States, complicates the notion of a rhetorical forum immensely. Even without adopting a broadly Marxian framework, it is clear that the rise and development of capitalism have permanently altered rhetorical deliberation and its forms and forums. [End Page 403] In what follows, I expand on these three criticisms first, by developing a historical account of the social changes that necessitate a rethinking of classical rhetorical theory; second, by comparing and contrasting Farrell’s work with two other contemporary Aristotelianisms, one antimodernist and the other solidly modernist; and third, by developing a framework for normative and empirical investigation of rhetoric that is, I hope... (shrink)

Within the Husserlian phenomenological philosophical tradition, description and interpretation co-exist. However, teaching the practice of phenomenological psychological research requires careful articulation of the differences between a descriptive and an interpretive relationship to what is provided by qualitative data. If as researchers we neglect the epistemological foundations of our work or avoid working through difficult methodological issues, then our work invites dismissal as inadequate science, undermining the effort to strongly establish psychology along qualitative lines. The first article in this two-part discussion (...) provides a Husserlian investigation of the meaning of ‘method’ for psychology as a human science. This investigation is undertaken in the light of some researchers’ appropriations of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics in the service of non-methodical praxes. The second article will address some implications of the attempt to structure qualitative psychological research along ‘Gadamerian’ lines, taking seriously the references to Gadamer’s work made by researchers such as Van Manen and Smith. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 11, Edition 1 May 2011, 69-85. (shrink)

There has been a longstanding and acrimonious debate in the human sciences over the role played by classic texts. Advocates of the classic insist its value is timeless and rests on the intrinsic superiority of its cognitive insights and aesthetic virtues. Critics, by contrast, argue that the respect accorded the classic is spurious because it conceals the ideological assumptions, tensions and discontinuities of tradition. This paper seeks a solution through the account of ‘the classical’ brought by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth (...) and Method, which acknowledges a text’s ‘eminence’ as well as its ‘historicity’. Following the introduction, the paper divides into four sections. Section one, notes that the hermeneutic account of tradition describes it as being open to challenge rather than closed and unchangeable, and that the classic, as grounded in tradition, will conserve difficulty as readily as comfortable certainty. Section two focuses on the idea that in the classic we find matter ‘properly portrayed’, while section three notes the importance of ‘application’ for an understanding of classic texts. It is noted that both ‘proper portrayal’ and ‘application’ depend on recognising the role of the fusion of historical horizons in generating classic texts. The final section challenges the criticism that the classic is no more than a reflection of the institutional power wielded by the canon, arguing instead that the classic and the canon are different entities, and conflating them in favour of the latter, misleadingly reduces classic-ness to being no more than an effect of canonicity. (shrink)

(2006). BOOK REVIEW of What Your Fourth Grader Needs to Know: Fundamentals of a Good Fourth-Grade Education. Educational Studies: Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 66-77.

This paper is an attempt to analyse the concept of literary autonomy, to explore its various manifestations in previous and current theories of literary studies and literary aesthetics, and to fit it into a broad outlook of literature's specificity and uniqueness. It defends the idea of literature's separate identity, however, not at the expense of breaking free of the concept of meaning in the strict sense, seeking special literary value in the independence of aesthetic value from other values, or in (...) the claim that literature has no purpose outside of itself, and then argues that such position need not be confounded with reductionism. (shrink)

Throughout its history of almost a millennium and a half, Sanskrit kāvyaśāstra was resolutely obsessed with the task of unravelling the ontology kāvya. Literary theoreticians in Sanskrit, irrespective of their spatio-temporal locations, unanimously agreed upon the fact that kāvya was a special mode of expression characterized by the presence of certain unique linguistic elements. Nonetheless, this did not imply that kāvyaśāstra was an intellectual tradition unmarked by disagreements. The real point of contention among the practitioners of Sanskrit literary theory was (...) the prioritization of certain formal elements as the ‘soul’ of literature. This strong sense of intellectual disagreement on the question of what constituted the soul of kāvya eventually paved the way for the emergence of new frameworks of criticism and extensive scrutiny of the existing categories, thus playing a vital role in keeping this tradition alive and new.But towards the turn of the 20th century, Sanskrit kāvyaśāstra tradition underwent an epistemic rupture primarily because of a change in the way the idea of literariness was understood. During this phase, the traditional Formalistic notions about literature underwent a radical transformation, and the style and language of literature eventually became similar to everyday speech. This trend played an important role in severing Sanskrit kāvyaśāstra’s natural tie with literature. Eventually, the vigour in which new treatises in Sanskrit literary poetics were produced also dwindled. This did not mean that the scholarship in Sanskrit poetics vanished. Scholars in Sanskrit poetics continued to flourish in India, but in a different form and shape. In other words, the focus of scholars in Sanskrit poetics slowly got shifted from the production of new treatises in Sanskrit poetics to the creation of the intellectual history of this field and the application of these theories to evaluate the literary merit of modern literary texts. Though these two approaches played a vital role in disseminating the knowledge about Sanskrit poetics in modern times, they were caught up in an ontological certitude. In other words, neither of these two directions attempted to study these theoretical positions from a standpoint other than that of literary theory. To borrow a Barthian terminology, these two approaches treated Sanskrit poetics as a ‘work,’ instead of a ‘Text.’ This paper aims to intervene in this lacuna of scholarship by proposing the Derridian idea of ‘play’ as a methodological framework to unearth the potentialities lying dormant in these theories and to move beyond the ontological certitude traditionally imposed on these theoretical positions. The new methodological praxis that I put forward in this paper is further exemplified through a non-canonical reading of Ānandavardhana’s avivakṣita-vācya-dhvani. (shrink)

The disruptions of life in late modernity render self-identity fragile. Consequently, individuals must reflexively manage their emotions and periodically reinvent themselves to maintain a coherent narrative of the self. The rise of psychology as a discursive regime across the 20th century, and its intersections with a plethora of wellness industries, has furnished a new language of selfhood and greater public attention to emotions and personal narratives of suffering. Celebrities, who engage in public identity work to ensure their continued relatability, increasingly (...) provide models for navigating emotional trials. In this article we explore representations of selfhood and identity work in celebrity interviews. We focus on media veterans Nigella Lawson and Ruby Wax, both of whom are skilled in re-storying the self after personal crises. We argue that interpretive capital as a peculiarly late modern resource confers emotional advantages and life chances on individuals as they navigate upheavals, uncertainties, and intimate dilemmas. (shrink)

In modern times a gap has appeared between the arts of history and literature, and the sciences of historicism and criticism. Many modern critics, historians, and teachers of literature and history (and even many so‐called authors of literature) have welcomed, or at least complied with, the “scientification” of their arts, resulting in widespread illiteracy with regard to literature and history. The solution to this problem lies in a (re‐)investigation of how the art of literature teaches us the truth. I maintain (...) that the lifeblood of literature is the set of common joys and griefs, the common blessings and sufferings, of mankind. Without a communication of these passions as passions with the result of a transformation or shaping of the soul – without a mimesis, as the Greeks would say –across the boundaries of tribe, race, gender and era, there is no literature; and no literacy. Using a scene from Solzhenitsyn's First Circle, I argue that these passions are part of the truth (or falsity) of any story involving human beings. So literature and history would both be restored if the writers, readers, and teachers of each developed a deeper concern for the whole truth. (shrink)

While philosophy has been defined as a critical endeavour since Plato, the critical potential of rhetoric has been mostly overlooked. In recent years, critique itself – as a means of enlightenment and emancipation – has come under attack. While there have been various attempts to renew and strengthen critical theory and practice, rhetoric has not yet played a part in these attempts. Addressing this lacuna, the article argues that rhetoric can function as a critical force within philosophy. The rhetorical perspective (...) confronts the claim to rational discourse and universal knowledge with the contingency of philosophical languages, means of representation, and social practices. Moreover, it allows us to think of critique as an activity of a subject that is at the same time constituted and transformed by it. This opens up the possibility of a rhetorical philosophizing that meets its critical standards by taking into account both the conditions of its own speaking and what it must exclude as its ‘other’ in order to function. (shrink)

ArgumentThe Thematic Apperception Test was a projective psychological test created by Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray and his lover Christina Morgan in the 1930s. The test entered the nascent intelligence service of the United States during the Second World War due to its celebrated reputation for revealing the deepest aspects of an individual's unconscious. It subsequently spread as a scientifically objective research tool capable not only of dredging the unconscious depths, but also of determining the best candidate for a management (...) position, the psychological complexes of human nature, and the unique characteristics of a culture. Two suppositions underlie the utility of the test. One is the power of narrative. The test entails a calculated abuse of the subjects tested, based on their inability to interpret their own narrative. The form of the test requires that a subject fail to decipher the coded, unconscious meaning their narrative reveals. Murray believed the interpretation of a subject's narrative and the projection contained therein depended exclusively on the psychologist. This view of interpretation stems from the seemingly more reasonable belief of nineteenth-century Romantic thinkers that a literary text serves as a proxy for an author's deepest self. The TAT also supposes that there is something beyond consciousness closely resembling a psychoanalytic unconscious, which also has clear precedents in nineteenth-century German thought. Murray's views on literary interpretation, his view of psychology as well as the continuing prevalence of the TAT, signals a nineteenth-century concept of self that insists “on relations of depth and surface, inner and outer life”. It is clear the hermeneutic practice of Freud's psychoanalysis, amplified in Jung, drew on literary conceptions of the unconscious wider than those of nineteenth-century psychology. (shrink)

The following examination explores the relationship between ethics, writing, finitude, spacing and sharing as they are presented in Nancy’s ‘The Free Voice of Man’ and ‘The Inoperative Community’ and in Derrida’s ‘Poetics and Politics of Witnessing’ and ‘Rams’. The interconnection between these events of being cannot be easily untangled since each moment is radically implicated with the others, defying both foundation and chronology. We are in a realm in which being must rather be understood as a series of singular ruptures (...) or interruptions that precisely and radically turns away from any sense of grounding or order. The discussion of being that follows is contextualized by the notion that there is a discursively inaccessible imperative to all philosophical discourses that ultimately implicates being in and as writing, finitude and spacing. This project thus exposes the manner in which being is fundamentally intertwined with the exhaustion of the philosophical endeavour. (shrink)

Being diagnosed with cancer can be one of those critical incidents that negatively affect the self. Identity is threatened when physical, psychological, and social consequences of chronic illness begin to erode one’s sense of self and challenge an individual’s ability to continue to present the self he or she prefers to present to others. Based on the notion of illness trajectory and adopting a Ricoeurian narrative perspective, this theoretical paper shall explore the impact of cancer disease on identity and establish (...) the crucial importance of metaphor in the narratives of life with cancer. Findings indicate that in cancer narratives the illness experience supplies the narrative structure with temporal and spatial meeting points that make the narrative comprehensible and meaningful. Cancer forces identity changes not only from having to endure the long-term physical and psychosocial effects of the disease, but also from inevitable existential questions about life’s meaning. Improved medical knowledge today means improved ethnomedical practices. Metaphor can bridge the gap between the cancer experience and the world of technology and treatment, helping patients to symbolically control their illness. (shrink)

This paper charts the journey that led to the author's discovery of phenomenology as a potential research methodology in the field of science education, and describes the impact on his own thinking and approach of his encounters with the work of Husserl and Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Van Manen. Drawing on this theoretical framework, the author argues that, as a methodology for investigating scientific thinking in relation to life experience, learning and curriculum design, phenomenology not only provides a means of accessing (...) subjective knowing and pure perception, but is sufficiently rigorous and systematic to represent the lifeworld experiences of research participants with a high degree of accuracy. In the process, he highlights the uniqueness and value of phenomenology in relation to quantitative and other qualitative research methods. The aim of this paper is to inspire insight into the value in science education research of using a methodology that fosters a deeper understanding of both teachers’ and learners’ lived experience of the scientific world. The challenge to science specialists, whether educators or researchers, would be to shift their default mode of understanding from the object pole to the ego pole, from the physical object to the human subject, from the observable and measurable to the lived as the true source of human knowledge. (shrink)

This article seeks to illuminate a crossover area between subject research and ‘scholarship of teaching’. It proposes that a strategic bridge between discipline as body of knowledge and discipline as pedagogy is the formation and socialization of the student through practices that are at once social, rhetorical, and intellectual. While acknowledging that many current formations are generic, and stem from extra-disciplinary priorities, the article takes two case studies from the history of English Literary Studies. In each of the two moments (...) explored , radical change in the subject was closely tied to the formation of paradigmatic identities for the student. In each case, radical change in the knowledge base and practice of subject professionals was mirrored in changes of practice in the classroom. Learners were socialized into a sense of belonging through rituals of opposition: in the one case to the perceived perils of mass culture, in the other to the collusions attributed to the chief practitioners of their own discipline. While actual students inevitably need to negotiate their own path through the discourses into which they are being socialized, the article argues the importance of close attention to the rituals of initiation into an ‘academic tribe’. (shrink)

This article focuses on a number of cases in international law in which US domestic courts have produced judgments that conflict with those given by the International Court of Justice. The nature of these courts’ judgments has been extremely closely tied to the interpretation given by the US national Executive to a certain international norm. This situation raises a number of questions, which can be broadly categorized into two spheres: the legal (regarding the overall legality of the courts’ decisions) and (...) the semiotic (regarding the manner in which a ‘meaning’ for the norm has been claimed by the courts). In this article we aim to provide answers to a number of these questions, both from the standpoint of international law and from that of a reader-response model of semiosis. We also analyse the level of interdependency that exists between the two spheres. (shrink)

This article argues the importance of including religion in the curriculum of undergraduate studies. Religion is, at its nexus, an ideology, a belief system that reverberates through literature and history. Such knowledge in itself is invaluable for students, introducing them to the difference between ideology and fact and to how ideology becomes intertwined with politics, economics, and other social forces. Introduced to such concepts, students begin to gain a more informed vision of religion which affords them the opportunity to engage (...) in more complex, synthetic interdisciplinary studies in a way that better mirrors our world. They become engaged in critical thinking that takes them beyond their own personal belief systems. (shrink)

The thesis contends that education and literary studies can make a valuable contribution to ethics and ethical development of persons, their relations with others and with the world. It promotes an approach to ethics education through dialogic enquiry based on theories and practices associated with comparative literature and philosophical enquiry. These involve students sharing experiences and meanings as they participate in interpretive communities and communities of philosophical enquiry. There are two main components to the research: ethically focused studies of literary (...) texts and the design, implementation and evaluation of a module in Ethics Education using literature and film as stimuli for Dialogic Enquiry. The literary analyses are influenced by reader-response theory. While recognizing the importance of the author or the contexts of production and receptions of texts, reader-response theory focuses on the experience of the reader as she/he responds to literary texts, and on her/his role in actively co-authoring the meaning of texts. Readers may form or join interpretive communities that share an ethos of practice. The literary narrative fictions studied include fairy tale, contemporary European cinema and neo-Western crime drama, each of which offers a valuable way of thinking about education. The module in ethics education, designed for Transition Year students, is based on movements in Philosophy with Children. Students formulate and explore ethical questions raised in response to themes or issues of literary texts. Dialogic communities of ethical inquiry may emerge from this. Students, participating in these dialogic communities of ethical inquiry, get to test out and develop their moral sense, understood in terms of reason, feeling, memory and imagination. The literary analyses demonstrate the ethically educative promise of literary texts, and the responses of students to this course and the growth of their ethical engagement suggest that this is a promising approach to ethics education. Such an educational experience may be ethical in matter, theory and practice and continue to find expression as praxis beyond the covers of books and walls of classrooms. (shrink)